


the present and probable future

by sevenfoxes



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 17:00:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfoxes/pseuds/sevenfoxes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Every decision echos upward. Every choice you could possibly make, every branch of eventuality. That's what watchers see - probability. That's why our visions are so fleeting. The future never changes - decisions just tell us which branch off the path a person will actually take. The good watchers can see more than a few hours into the paths, navigate them, follow the decisions to the inevitable conclusion of the probability. Some can see days - years - into the future."</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The future is a game of chance.  Nick's always been a gambler.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the present and probable future

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mynuet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mynuet/gifts).



> I know this isn't exactly what you had in mind when you asked for AUs (and I know you said only Cassie/Nick, but I cheated a wee bit at the beginning - let's pretend it doesn't count). I just found the quote that you offered up very inspiring, but in a slightly different direction than intended, I think. Hope it's still to your liking!

When Nick is seventeen, he sleeps with his first watcher.

(In time, he'll come to realize it's a bit of a thing with him. Kira is the only pusher he ever hooks up with - the rest are all watchers. He tells himself that it's partially because he enjoys the idea of them seeing him coming a mile away. Psychic foreplay has always been his favourite.)

Her name is Francoise and she's older - not much, but enough. She's French, lives in the outskirts of Paris, but speaks English with a flawless British accent. Sleeping with her was probably one of the dumbest things Nick could have possibly done. Division is on the warpath for her; Francoise is on the top of the watch lists for Western Europe. But he's been more and more reckless lately, taking liberties that he knows may come back to bite him in the ass.

(Nick's tired of running.)

He met her through a shadow he knew in the city, introduced in a club with too much smoke and terrible europop playing too loud over rapid-fire French. Nick doesn't know much about her other than the fact that she likes having her knees touched when he goes down on her, she's got a crescent-shaped scar on the side of her left breast, and she's one of the most powerful watchers in the world.

(She's brilliant, beautiful, and predatory.)

After, he lies beside her, just the sound of rain and the dull hum of the city beyond, her ragged breathing as she slowly comes down.

He doesn't remember what he asks her, some silly line that was meant to be light and joking, but she sighs heavily instead.

Nick can see the sweat on her shoulders glistening in the draft of light coming from the window when she shrugs. "It's not like that. We don't really see _the future._ "

"Huh?" To be honest, Nick's never really spent much time thinking about watchers and their powers. It freaks him out a bit, to be honest. He'd rather sit with a pack of short-tempered bleeders than hang around watchers or pushers. Fucking with people's minds is messed up.

"Every decision echos upward. Every choice you could possibly make, every branch of eventuality. That's what watchers see - probability. That's why our visions are so fleeting. The future never changes - decisions just tell us which branch off the path a person will actually take. The good watchers can see more than a few hours into the paths, navigate them, follow the decisions to the inevitable conclusion of the probability. Some can see days - years - into the future."

Nick's head is spinning. The shitty vodka from the bar is making him far too drunk for this conversation. "So you're telling me there's a bunch of different worlds out there with a bunch of different 'me's?"

"No, not worlds. Just chance," she explains, reaching for the cigarettes on the small night table with a delicate stained glass lamp. Francoise lights one, letting the smoke slither slowly out from between her lips. "They don't really exist. And while their conclusions are all different, you'd be surprised at how similar the paths are. The people we will meet, we will meet...whether it be in a week or a decade. That's why you can make choices that watchers can't track. It's not that we can't see the paths, it's that they are often so similar that it's easy to confuse them."

Nick snorts. "Okay…" Watchers are fucking weird. He figures having some contraband tv station constantly playing through your brain has got to fry a few synapses.

She shoots him a look like she can read his mind, which freaks him out for a second. That isn't a power he's heard of yet, but with all the experiments it's rumoured Division is undertaking, he's sure those assholes will figure out how to flip that switch eventually.

"Mon cher," she says, her voice full of derision, "I've seen your future, the millions of paths you could take from today, and they all lead to the same person."

"Right," he says, his tone mimicking hers. Despite himself, he really, really likes her. He's always liked women who have given him shit and taken exactly zero of his. His best buddy Eddie (before Division got their hands on him and fried his brain like an egg) used to call it spanking his masochistic streak. "Are you in my future, then?"

Francoise smiles, the edges of her eyes sharp. Her pupils seem to vibrate in the low light.

"Not me."

 

 

 

T H I R T E E N >>

Division finally catches up with Nick when he's twenty one. In Minnesota of all places.

He thinks he ends up at a facility on the west coast. He remembers visiting San Francisco with his father when he was little and for some reason, the sun he sees for brief, flickering moments as he passes from one exam room to the next reminds him of the sun in San Francisco.

(He doesn't know though - the hit he took to the head knocked him out for a few hours and by the time he woke up, he was blindfolded on a plane.)

The girl in the cell beside him is so young that Nick's chest hurts every time they bring her back from whatever tests they drag her out to conduct. Her arms are painfully thin, covered in track marks from the drugs they've been shooting into her. The walls between the cells are mostly bulletproof plastic, treated with some chemical that dampens powers, makes it impossible to push, bleed or move from within its walls.

(But the watchers can still see. He can hear them screaming at night when they dream.)

She's been too weak over the past few days to talk to him, so he doesn't know her name. He's seen the Division docs outside her cell, close enough to read the paperwork on the clipboard that hangs outside.

_C. Holmes_

Nick knows she's a watcher. They have it the worst. Division brass, it seems, has it out for the watchers. They are a slowly dying breed, hunted to the edge of extinction by ruthless governments and long-reaching corporations desperate to have the edge on probability, desperate to extend the reach of watchers' powers with experimental drugs cooked up by crooked pharmas.

They bring her back late one night; the guards have to carry her to the bed. Her feet are tiny, little flecks of nailpolish still clinging to her toenails. The once colourful streaks in her hair have begun to fade out, turning as pale and lifeless as her skin.

When he moves closer to her, she turns to look at him. Her eyes are a frightening shade of blue and the pupil is no longer circular, instead bleeding into the iris in strange ways.

"I saw you. I saw you. It wasn't supposed to be like this," she says with a sad smile before she passes out.

 

 

S I X H U N D R E D AND S E V E N T Y N I N E >>

Nick's been working with a group operating out of Morocco. Division closed up shop in the country in the late '90s when its headquarters were razed after a particularly bloody coup d'etat followed by several years of increasingly hostile military governments. It's one of the few places in the world untouched by Division, and the perfect staging ground for the rebellion. There are several cells located around the world, and Nick joined this one a little less than a year ago, an import from the Paris cell after the leader of the Moroccan cell ended up dead in a siege that went bad in Manilla.

There's seven of them: Nick, a Brazilian pusher named Lydia, a bleeder from England named Henry, a pair of shadow twins named Zeke and Trevor, and a loud-mouthed shifter that refuses to give them his real name, only answering to "Fisher."

And the watcher. Cassie.

She's the youngest of the group by far at twenty-two, but she's easily the most powerful. Cassie doesn't talk much about her family, but rumour has it that her mother was one of the most powerful watchers ever. That is before Division got ahold of her. Though no one has ever seen the body, Division records they recovered in Shanghai list her date of death as the day before Cassie's eighteenth birthday.

When Nick first moves into the small compound outside of Tangier, she barely speaks to him, her eyes flicking occasionally between him and her drawing pad as he grows accustomed to the dry heat of the countryside.

There are pleasantries exchanged at meals, a few short conversations as Nick helps plan a prisoner extraction. But she's a quiet thing, always watching, always listening. Always seeing.

("She used to be a firecracker," Zeke tells him as they examine badly water-damaged blueprints of a Division safehouse in Finland. "Hasn't been the same since we got her out of Division.")

One night, Nick slips. He can't help it. He tells himself it's because he's always had a thing for watchers, but he knows that isn't true. He tells himself it's because he hasn't bedded anyone in more than a year, but he knows that isn't true either.

(The truth is that he's been dreaming about her for weeks non-stop, that he flips through her notepad when she's sleeping, touches her prophetic drawings and wonders whose headless body she is sketching this time. The truth is that his want is so heavy and consuming that it feels like a push.)

The rest of the compound is asleep when he finds her on the small balcony off the main drawing room. Even in the middle of the night, the heat is oppressive, rolling in off the hills in the distance. Cassie is standing in a light tank top and shorts, leaning on the wall that, even with her ridiculously long legs, reaches up past her waist. She is staring out at the dark abyss in front of her, no man-made light in the distance.

If she hears him, she doesn't reveal it. Cassie turns her face into the breeze; even this far off the coast, the smell of the salt water from the Strait of Gibraltar is everywhere.

Nick knows he shouldn't touch her, but he does it anyway. His fingertips brush against the soft skin of her back, that shallow little dip between a woman's shoulderblades. There's just the lightest hint of perspiration in the vulnerable space; he feels the bone underneath shift as she moves.

(She doesn't jump, doesn't flinch, doesn't say anything. She saw him coming. She came, stood in this place knowing that he would come to her.)

"I wish I didn't know how this all ends up," Cassie says quietly, her face still hidden from him. "I wish I knew how to fix things, how to change our path enough..."

He flinches unconsciously when she turns, reaches up and touches his mouth.

It's so dark that he can only see the ridge of her cheeks, the whites of her eyes and swell of her mouth, everything else consumed by night. He wants to kiss her so badly he can feel his entire body vibrating with it.

"Sometimes we need to walk it anyway," she mutters low, as if she is speaking only to herself.

When he leans down and kisses her, she moves like she is expecting it.

 

 

S I X T Y N I N E T H O U S A N D S I X H U N D R E D AND T H I R T Y T H R E E >>

Nick finds the watcher he's been tracking in Madrid. She's been hiding out in the seedier side of the city, bunking in a cheap inn used primarily by hookers and druggies. Which was a poor idea, frankly, because the girl, even at twenty, looks so out of place (not exactly innocent, but far too classy for the environment she's in - even with the weird coloured shit she's got in her hair) that she couldn't possible stick out more if she tried.

He's burned through seven different sniffers and a handful of watchers trying to get his hands on this girl. She's been able to out maneuver all of them, tracking a strange path across Asia and Europe. Nick has never had a target evade him for as long or as successfully, and though it impresses him, it also irritates him.

Carver wouldn't tell him much about the girl other than the fact that her mother was a high priority detainee and that they had a sneaking suspicion that her mother's talent had been passed down onto her. In the five years he's been working for Division, he's never seen them put out a dragnet for anyone this long or this heavy.

Nick's waiting for her in her shitty motel room when she comes back from a run to the local store around the block. Though the shadows hide him well, she stops only a steps inside the door, sensing his presence. From across the room, he moves the door shut behind her.

"Well, well, Miss Holmes. You are far prettier in person, I must say."

Her lips turn down. To give her credit, she doesn't run for the door. Surprisingly, she moves closer to him, stepping into the tall strip of light provided by the window between them.

"Nick."

"Guilty," he says, holding up his hands. "I'm surprised you didn't see me coming, being as talented as you are."

This time she smiles. "Maybe I did."

Nick doesn't like the sudden turn in her tone. In his day, he's taken down a few watchers, wipers, and pushers, and the ones that can fuck with your mind are the worst. Get inside it and turn things around. And there's something about Cassie Holmes that makes him feel deeply unsettled. "Maybe you did."

Cassie yelps as he uses his powers to drag her closer to him, the soles of her boots scraping loudly over the floor as he stands from the chair he was sitting in, bringing her less than an arm's length away. Even with her boots and long legs, she's still a good four inches shorter than he is, and he uses the space to loom over her.

"I've been looking for you for a long time, Cassie," he croons at her through a forced grin. She's the one that should feel like a trapped animal, not him, but he can't help feeling like he's the one being backed into a corner.

"I've been watching you for a long time, _Nick_ ," she replies.

The smile disappears off his face. This is the point where the begging usually comes, the pleas for mercy, for release. Instead, she looks defiant, her hands coming to rest on her hips. So he steps forward, closing the space between them, and cups his hand around her cheek. "You're gonna love Division, sweetheart."

Cassie looks unimpressed, her mouth and eyes filled with mocking. "You're not going to take me in," she says with a sugary sweet smile, like she can see right through his act.

"Oh, I'm not, am I?"

Her fingers come to wrap around the wrist of the hand he's got pressed to the cut of her jaw, her thumb skimming over the deep scar in his wrist. "You wonder sometimes, wonder why you don't remember the scars on your body, why your memories never seem to add up. Wonder who you really are."

He draws away from her, a chill running up his spine. He feels his breathing pick up, the sound of his blood pounding in his ears.

"Been running from it a long time, haven't you Nick?" she asks, pressing forward. "Kept willfully letting yourself be used because the reality was just too pathetic to accept."

"Shut up." He presses his power into her, lets her feel the threat of his anger. He wraps himself around her thighs, her waist, her throat. Pressing in. Waiting. "Shut the fuck up."

"Carver really worked you over, didn't he? Warped you into his own little mindless soldier. Turned you into a monster," she spits at him, her eyes narrowing in accusation. She's pushing at him, trying to get under his skin. "How does it feel to work for the man who killed your father?"

Nick hears her body slam into the wall before his brain registers what he's done.

 

By the time she's woken up, Nick has cleaned the small cut on her forehead.

He hears her stir beside him on the bed where he laid her down, her skin pale against the tacky maroon flowers printed across the bedspread. In his chair beside the bed, he leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. She reaches to touch the swelling, red wound on her head and grimaces as her fingers make landfall on the ruined skin. The regret he feels is instantaneous and deep.

(He doesn't understand this man he's become. He feels wrong. He feels wrong every day, something chipping away at a truth held beneath. Nick's tired of hurting people. Tired of hurting.)

"Tell me," he says.

Cassie sits up against the headboard. All the bravado from earlier is gone, replaced with something far worse. Pity.

"Okay."

 

 

E I G H T H U N D R E D T H O U S A N D T H R E E H U N D R E D AND T W E L V E >>

The sirens around them won't stop screaming; they cut the power, so the building is dark save for the emergency flood lights and the flashing yellow security lights that run off the only back-up generator they weren't able to disable.

Nick's got Cassie tucked up against him in one of the padded rooms Division uses for the watchers whose minds they have warped beyond recognition, who have to be kept from hurting themselves. The Berlin facility was supposed to be a cakewalk, a low-level holding facility. Instead, they stumble onto a major find - the cook house for the latest shit Division has been pumping into pushers.

(And a militarized batch of movers, pushers and bleeders to match.)

Sometimes it's hard to remember the girl he's holding is only seventeen - enough bravado and strength and weariness for a girl twice her age. But now, here… she's so light and insubstantial it's like he's holding onto air. Even her blood feels too light spread across his fingers.

"It's been a slice," Cassie says, and when she smiles, Nick can see blood on her teeth, the trickle of it sliding out of the corner of her mouth. Nick's known her long enough to recognize her act; she's scared.

"Don't," he says, his own words tasting fruitless in his mouth. He would give anything in this moment to be a stitch, to be able to heal the jagged hole in her abdomen.

"Get my mom out," she whispers back, her hand moving down to where his is valiantly trying to keep as much of her blood inside her as possible. She squeezes it, gets blood all over her hand, their skin slip-sliding against one another.

It's impossible to miss the way her eyes dilate as she notices his head dipping down. When he kisses her, she tastes like blood and nothing else.

His mouth is still resting against hers when he feels her breath disappear.

When the agents finally break down the door, Nick moves them so hard that the entire wall goes with them, shattering the bones of the building.

 

 

F I V E T H O U S A N D T W O H U N D R E D AND N I N E T Y N I N E >>

The year Nick turns thirty-two, Division implodes.

There isn't a hell of a lot of credible intel on what actually happened, but there's a strong rumour making the rounds that it was watchers - a mother and daughter team - that eventually brought it down.

("They say the girl shot Carver right between the eyes," Hook says, his voice crackling over the line from Tokyo.)

Nick has spent most of his life on the run, hopscotching between safehouses, fleeing from cops and gangsters and Division agents. This new reality of freedom is strange and unfamiliar to him. Sure, he still has the muscle for the bookies and underground casinos that he cheats occasionally coming after him, but it's a lot easier to lose them without having to stay under the radar enough to throw off Division.

He celebrates by flying to Amsterdam and getting _spectacularly_ fucked up.

The truth is that he'll never forgive himself for not being part of it, for running when he should have been fighting, for bolting the second the Division agents knocked on his door looking for a girl.

(The truth is that he will never be the man his father was, the man his father wanted him to be. He's spent his life in fear of a girl with a flower. )

As he falls asleep on the lumpy mattress of his hotel room, his lungs full of smoke and his blood singing with alcohol, he tries to remember what it's like not be afraid of the future.

 

The hangover is easily one of the worst of Nick's life. He's forgotten how potent the drugs are in Amsterdam - not to be fucked with. He spends a full day in bed before wandering out late in the afternoon on the second to find coffee and food he can stand the sight of.

He stops at a cafe a few blocks from his hotel and downs three cups of coffee and a strange pastry that the waitress suggests in broken English (that turns out to be pretty decent). The day is warm enough that he can sit outside on the patio, but he wears his sunglasses the entire time, his slightly bloodshot eyes not quite ready for sunlight.

He's busy pulling out euros from his wallet to pay the bill and leave a hefty tip when a woman drops into the empty seat across from him at his table. She's beautiful: blonde, lithe, with sharp blue eyes that narrow when she smiles.

"Nick," she says, clearing her throat before tucking one thigh over the other and leaning back against her chair. There's a small chrysanthemum folded into the blonde hair tucked over her left ear. "You look like shit."

Nick curls his fingers against the force he moves, ready for a fight. Division's supposedly gone, but power abhors a vacuum, and he's sure that soon enough something new will rise amongst its ashes. "We met before, sweetheart?"

She reaches up, pulling the flower from her hair and tossing it onto the table, the blood red bloom landing next to his coffee cup.

"No," she says with a smile, "but we're supposed to."

 

 

T W O M I L L I ON F O U R H U N D R E D AND S I X T E E N T H O U S A N D >>

"Cassie!"

Her eyes peel open, completely disoriented.  NIck's got her cradled his lap, her body resting against his chest.

Behind them, the Division facility burns ferociously, occasional explosions piercing the quiet of the night. The few remain escapees bolt to the fields in the east, seeking cover.

Cassie's arm is badly dislocated and she's got a nasty gash to her side from the Division mover who picked her up as she was running and put her through a glass wall before Nick was able to kill him. The blood is staining the white jumper Cassie is wearing, the same jumper all detainees at the Belgrade facility are forced to wear. Nick can feel the wet warmth against his skin as the blood begins to seep into his own shirt.

She's so much thinner now, her once plump cheeks gaunt.  Nick doesn't want to think about what they've done to her, what damage they've inflicted in the time it's taken him to find her.

Tilting her chin enough to peer up at him, she stares, wide-eyed.  Somehow, Nick knows what she's about to say before she says it.  It chills him to the marrow of his bones.

"Who are you?"

The look of pure confusion on Cassie's face is enough to crack Nick in two.

_She doesn't remember him._

(This isn't how he imagined it. This isn't how he imagined finding her after close to fourteen months of scouring the fucking planet for her. He imagined his Cassie, the Cassie he last saw in Shenzhen, flipping him the bird as she left their hotel room, running down the street to pick up some food. The Cassie who never came back, who disappeared into the maze of Division.)

Nick turns to Cleveland, the wipe he rescued a few months ago in Taipai. "Is it a push or was she wiped?"

The panic on Cassie's face is easy to read.  It's always been the unknown that she's been most afraid of, of secrets and deception; it's one of the reasons she's always hated working with pushers.

Cleveland skims his hands in the air around Cassie's temple, his eyes flutterng.  "I don't know," he says.  "I've never seen anything like this before.  Normally, with a push or even a wipe, you can see the fragments of what was removed.  There's nothing here, Nick.  It's just emptiness."

"Fuck!" Nick growls, grasping Cassie's two wrists gently in one of his hands when feels her begin to shove ineffectually against him, still weak with whatever shit they had been pumping into her. "Fix her!"

Cleveland's face drains of colour. Nick knows that his temper is a scary thing. It's only grown over the last year, a beast unleashed when he lost Cassie, pushing him to things he never thought himself capable of. 

"Listen," Cleveland says, opening his palms towards Nick, "I know she's your wife, but-"

Nick fists his hand in the man's shirt. "I don't care what you need - I'll get it. Just tell me how to fix her."

 

 

 

N I N E T Y T W O T H O U S A N D N I N E H U N D R E D AND N I N E >>

He's not quite sure when she went from the sixteen year old he found hitchhiking to Berlin to the young woman sitting across from him, sixty percent legs and forty percent attitude. When she went from someone Nick thought of as a little sister to something decidedly not.

It's been five years of running, five years of hiding from Division and the various emerging super powers trying their hand at harnessing powers. Five years of changing their names, dying Cassie's hair, Nick fluctuating between shaving and growing his beard until Cassie threatens to shave it in his sleep. 

She had just looked so young when they first met, so thin and ragged from running alone, attitude seeping from every pore. It had been easy to think of her as a sister because, truth be told, she reminded Nick of himself so much that sometimes it felt like staring at a reflection of  his sixteen year old self.

Now, Nick doesn't know what to think. He finds himself looking at her in a way that would make him beat the living shit out of any else. He'll let his eyes linger a little too long on her legs when she gets out of the shower, wrapped up in a fluffy towel. He'll stare at the way her breasts curve so sweetly under his shirt that she's commandeered to sleep in. 

But mostly, she's just... changed. She's no longer the girl unsure of her powers, arrogance and attitude masking a deep insecurity. She's his partner in crime, sure of herself in a way that not even Nick has managed to master.  Still lots of attitude, yes, but earned this time, her powers blossoming under his nose. She's brave and loyal, and far too good for Nick. 

(He tries to remember this when she's sleeping next to him on whatever bed in whatever city they're in for the moment. It's the only thing that keeps him from touching her. From reaching out and closing the distance left between them.) 

This motel is in Colombia. It's excruciatingly hot and the weird little air conditioner is doing no more than push around hot air. Cassie is sitting on the bed in one of his shirts and her underwear, her notepad spread out in front of her. He can see what looks like a drawing of bodies under her quickly moving pen as he steps out of the bathroom. 

"How often do you see us die?" he asks, stopping just short of the bed. She stops sketching, leaning her body back against the headboard with one perfectly arched eyebrow raised. 

"There are no happy endings for us, Nick," Cassie says with the calm of a watcher who knows what's to come. Nick laughs. He's known this for years, didn't need Cassie to tell him that. She echos his smile like she can read his mind, though hers is sadder, an edge of something unsaid. 

(In that moment, he is overwhelmed. She is too beautiful for this, too good for the shit life that he has pulled her into. But Nick had never claimed to be a good man. He is selfish. And he wants to take.) 

There's a second where she zones out, getting the glassy-eyed look she always gets when she's having a vision. They don't seem to hurt the way they used to ( _like taking a bullet to the head_ , she used to say), but he can always seen the way her mouth tightens with the pain. 

This time, when she comes out of it, she looks shocked in a way she never does. And he knows. He had made the decision the second he had walked out of the bathroom, transfixed on her hands, wondering what the pads of her fingers would taste like on his tongue, how the curve of her neck would feel under his teeth. 

She takes a shaky breath in and looks up at him. 

"You saw," Nick says, his voice low and grinding. "You saw. What I'm going to do." 

Cassie opens her mouth like she's going to answer, but it just hangs as her chest rises and falls erratically. She nods shakily. 

"Good," Nick says. 

When he leans down on the bed, Cassie welcomes him into the cradle of her hips. 

 

 

O N E >>

"Hey Nick."

"Who is this?"

"Open up, Nick. Oh, and put your gun down."

He tucks the phone against his chest, pulls down the safety quietly, and opens the door.


End file.
